Publication Category: Sexuality

It was probably at least a decade ago, while I was teaching at Oberlin, that a young African-American woman — I’ll call her Tonya — who had been a student in several of my classes told me she was leaving school, at least for a year. I knew her quite well and was in fact …

A 59-year-old woman told a California infertility clinic that she was only 50, and four years later gave birth to a baby girl. The clinic, which sets 55 as the maximum age for patients seeking a donated egg, was fooled by the woman’s relatively young appearance and her falsified documents. At the time of the …

"As for you, do not pray for this people, . . for I do not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen …

"What I’m really looking for is a girl who will give me a beautiful sexual experience. I don’t want only relief of my sexual tension." A college junior blurted out these words in a question-and-answer period after a talk I gave before a college audience. I had challenged the view that there is no longer …

Like any Catholic college, mine boasts an ethic of sexual abstinence for students, does not allow any form of birth control to be distributed on campus, and has same-sex residence halls that post visiting hours for members of the opposite sex. Yet most students will tell you, if asked in the right setting, that there …

When I began teaching Christian ethics in the late 1960s, I found Helmut Thielicke’s The Ethics of Sex particularly helpful. It explained to my students the logic, if not the validity, of the traditional "double standard" in sexual morality. Accepting Thielicke’s "orders of creation" argument, I taught that women invest more of themselves in sexual …

She is an attractive woman, dark hair pulled back in a bun (the way my mother used to wear hers), probably in her mid-40s. Well dressed, friendly and a bit exuberant, she reflects a sense of happiness and excitement rarely found in a seatmate on a crowded plane traveling to Chicago. I am hunched over …

Samuel Johnson reportedly once told an aspiring author, "Your manuscript is both good and original; unfortunately, the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good." The danger in reflecting on the eight articles in The Christian Century’s sexual ethics series is in producing just such a manuscript. …

The title of this Christian Century series, After the Revolution: The Church and Sexual Ethics, suggests two things: that there has been a sexual revolution, and that the revolution is over. Though in some ways both claims are true, in other ways the revolution has just begun. Clearly the past quarter-century has witnessed significant changes …

The publication of Human Sexuality: New Directions in American Catholic Thought by the Catholic Theological Society (Paulist, 1977) is destined to generate a new round of discussion about sexual ethics. I fear, however, that if the debate is carried on in the terms which the report itself uses, we will not make much progress in …

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